I'm now at the point where I need a comprehensive site design before doing the next chunk of implementation. So...if anyone has ideas burning away in their head for layout / design issues, NOW is the time to yell.

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So how far away do you think we are from the new jgf?

FYI, Beanshell, cookies, and POST'ing etc are now all integrated, as well as session management. So, theoretically, 70% of the base system is in place. Local server is taking logins and the pages are dynamically constructed according to context.

There's enough right now that - if people were to donate a couple hundred dollars more - I could upload an alpha where you could create accounts, login, etc. I need to add the permissions system so that some people have the ability to edit pages etc, and also need to make the DB schemas and populate the database with the XML data, but the basic system is working fine.

With a dedicated server paid for and ready to go, I would have the games listings ready in just a few lunch-breaks, and proably have most of the automated game-submission (including testers etc) a few days after that.

But there's no server at the moment, so I can't even give you guys a demo .

When it goes live I'll post all the design notes - there's a few other big HTML files like this one. These are primarily for people developing on JGF (currently just me, really) both to explain how JGF works so they can plan changes properly, and so I don't have to explain to people repeatedly the various concepts....at the moment, it's all jumbled up into one file. Probably bits will be split up and turned into an article "how JGF works", and other bits might be split off and turned into docs only visible to developers working on JGF itself (or maybe we'll keep them open).

It's not 100% correct, and there are some sentencs and paras that are misleading or outright wrong, but its pretty close to the way the system actually works.

PS some of this is just copy/pasted wholesale from the docs for the CMS system we're making on top of the GrexEngine, hence the veering back and forth from talking about JGF (which is built on top of the CMS) and the CMS (which is in turn built on top of the GrexEngine).

There's enough right now that - if people were to donate a couple hundred dollars more - I could upload an alpha where you could create a...

You should make the donation drive more prominent on the site. It appears to only be on the About page. Most visitors are probably heading straight to the games. Put it in the header at the top or at least on the landing page.

You should make the donation drive more prominent on the site. It appears to only be on the About page. Most visitors are probably heading straight to the games. Put it in the header at the top or at least on the landing page.

Oops. Thanks - done. One thing we *definitely* are having for v3 is a "traditional" front page news .

FYI, Beanshell, cookies, and POST'ing etc are now all integrated, as well as session management. So, theoretically, 70% of the base system is in place. Local server is taking logins and the pages are dynamically constructed according to context.

Make that 85% . Self-installing "models" (create DB tables or alter existing ones) and compile-time-checked and managed "filters" (map roughly to SQL queries, and de-couple SQL schema from the handling of values returned from the DB) are now both working.

Still to go: permissions (10%) and cleaning up the models/filters management code (5%).

After that, everything else can be written at a high-level using a combination of java, beanshell-scripts, velocity-templates, and CSS styling.

I haven't done any performance profiling yet, and the app-cache no longer works (will have to wait for the next version), but it's surprisingly fast so far, piggybacking off a Grex test server with 1Gb RAM and sub-500Mhz CPUs in it. I'll be interested to see what its like when I'm done - I was expecting to have to do LOTS of optimization if the app-cache wasn't ready for use, because there's lots of "dodgy" techs in the stack, like beanshell (reflection-heavy, no compilation), velocity (reflection-heavy, no compilation, no NIO support).

LOL. This whole project has been surprisingly good fun. I think it's just a massive relief for me to get to work on something neither low-level nor "hard". I'd forgotten what it felt like to write code and actually enjoy the process :-/.

95%...just waiting for some new html/css code, then I'll build a small site (news, account/registration, one forum), and we're ready to go Alpha. Once that's up, I'll work on transferring over the games, and the automated game-submission process, and giving the jgf-testers admin rights to do their stuff online directly...which should result in quite a boost to the speed with which new games are accepted.

All in all that's about two lunch-break's worth of code left to go - but we're still a couple of hundred dollars short (donations have dried up).

PLEASE if you've considered donating, but haven't yet, donate something now! Or get a friend to donate, even as little as $5 would help...is that much to pay, in return for the large crop of games on JGF? Sure, none of the money is going towards the games themselves, but helping the site helps the game developers (more promotion for them, and we'll be giving free download space + bandwidth etc - so your few dollars given now will be potentially saving $5-$10 for each and every developer every month from now on!)

PS according to SLOCcount (counts source code, estimates project implementation time), the JGFv3 code I've written in the last 2 months is 4.6 months worth of code, not including non-java stuff like templates, beanshell, etc.

Pretty good for a part-time effort . Although more to the point it confirms the wisdom of choosing to do this on the GrexEngine - that's massively increased the productivity (mainly through helper-systems, automated module-management, debugging features, etc - and not having to waste any time writing networking code ).

So, BBB, whats going on? Are we about to see the release of the new version?

1) Are you still looking for games?2) Are you still looking for help?3) Are the APIs to build into my game coming along yet?4) Any more articles on the way?5) Will we ever see the other sections of your development diary? (I for one would love to read)6) Is there anything else the community can do to help out? (other than donate )

Note, most of this isn't me volunteering right now. I'd just like to get the answers to questions I'm sure the community are asking and get the ball rolling a bit more. I'd hate to see this idea fall in any way by the wayside.

So, BBB, whats going on? Are we about to see the release of the new version?

Still need $200, although...I have a tentative promise from someone for that much money. Waiting to see if it happens or not.

Also...the new site design is coming along nicely, getting lots of useful feedback from friends and whoever I can show it to offline.

Some problems with the way data is handled in the CMS which involve writing 100 lines of new code for every new database table, which is a PITA, and I'd love to find a way to circumvent , but otherwise that's all working fine.

Security system not quite working yet (considering doing external auth via LDAP just to save hassle).

Ah...and there was something else, but I can't remember what.

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1) Are you still looking for games?

People have stopped submitting them recently, most of the testers have disappeared, and I'm not actively seeking games out now until v3 goes up, because of the time involved.

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2) Are you still looking for help?

No help needed now until we get the server setup, and I upload the alpha, and start assigning accounts, roles, etc.

...unless there are any system architects around here with in-depth experience of CMS design, who could help sort out some esoteric complex problems with part of the system design.

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3) Are the APIs to build into my game coming along yet?

No progress on that at all. Although there are 3 people who were volunteering to author these API's, all my spare time is going into the new site, and we'll have to wait and see whether they are still available once thats up.

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4) Any more articles on the way?

. 3 in-progress, and a couple more promised - but all need chasing up and again this is on hold until the new site is up. Partly because a lot of the organization of this stuff can be more easily done via the site.

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5) Will we ever see the other sections of your development diary?

LOL. Howabout: when we release v2 of survivor?

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6) Is there anything else the community can do to help out? (other than donate )

I would prefer nothing at the moment - I am at the limit of the workload I can handle, and it's all bottlenecked on me right now.

Once the new site goes live, there will be a lot more that people can do, but not yet.

Oh, and we're scraping the b/w limit on grexengine.com again, so please hold off on promoting the site for now :-/

HiWe could donate a whole server with a static IP in our server parkCEO Agency9

Thanks to Agency9, we're going to go ahead and try this. It might not work out, but we'll start with getting the JGF v3 alpha up there and see how things go from there. It looks like they can handle the b/w OK, which was the major concern.

...well, OK, not really, but if you've got a REALLY dull job it might excite you .

NB: this is NOT ready yet. It's just that I've installed what I needed on the server A9 donated and unpacked a "default" self-installing CMS + JGF package.

For those interested, this means I just java -jar'd the pre-baked package and it auto-installs and auto-detects whatever it can. The default package I made for JGF just includes some basic images and pages.

This server could go up and down arbitrarily whilst I populate it with the other modules etc. At the moment, you can technically create new user accounts, login, submit games and news etc (if you can guess the URL's) - but I suggest you don't bother ; I may well reset the DB (multiple times) over the coming days and wipe anything you do.

Again, FYI, this is because of the self-installing stuff. If I add a column to a DB table it's easiest for me to:

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uninstallmodule-xxx

and then

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java -jarjgf-cms.jar

...which will auto install module-xxx and thus auto-create all the tables in the new format, instead of me having to faff around going into the admin system and initiating a data-preserving upgrade from one version of a module to the next.

Oh, and it could change port arbitrarily (it needs to move to port 80 sooner or later).

Things are stable now. The server should be up almost all of the time (bar a few minutes every few days when I'm doing stuff where I want it offline whilst I tinker).

Feel free to create an account (there's no checking done, takes a few seconds only).

I suggest you enter a valid email address - when I add the email-checker for new accounts, I'll mark all exsiting accounts "unverified" and the only way you'll be able to verify and re-gain access to the account is if you had a valid email address on it in the first place.

I'll put up some goodies (something to see/do) as soon as I can. Perhaps at the weekend. So far I've been concentrating on getting some admin tools up and running (and checking that the security is working to lock non-admins out!) and checking and fixing debug stuff (if you find a bug in the java code you should get an HTML page full of stack trace info and instructions on what to do with it; there were a couple of places that were sidestepping that error-handler which I had to find and fix).

PS there is an aggressive firewall on the box, so if you have any ongoing troubles connecting, or particular pages/images don't display, please let me know - I might have been TOO aggressive!

PPPS: that's a static IP, so don't worry it won't change. It'll be some time before I update the DNS records (i.e. make javagamesfactory.org point to this server) simply because there's a lot of preparatory work to do (there are lots of links to javagamesfactory.org/* on the net that would break)

It will be slow because there's no file caching at the moment, hence if the server goes to sleep (no clients for a few hours) there could be a pause as it triggers a fetch direct from disk.

Also, there appears to be some kind of bug with the streaming of plain static files. Every 4th or 5th page-load in mozilla when done over local LAN "loses" the first 1 or 2 images and the first style sheet.

This probably means there's a race condition in the file-streaming and the server is dropping the leading bytes. This is a serious problem for once the server starts streaming large files, so we'll need to fix it . Then again, this might only appear over the LAN...

If you can reliably get problems with images not loading, please let me know!

I've just done a major update of the alpha/test site. Not much more to see (yet), it's mostly behind the scenes stuff (admin etc).

There's now a working news module - PLEASE if you have any news you think would be good on the front page, login and "submit" your news for review; you'll be helping test the system . It won't appear immediately (it automatically goes to all the "news-editors" for review first) but if it's not entirely frivolous I'll probably OK it.

And there's a tutorials module (although I haven't transferred any tutorials over yet).

PS: I haven't personally looked at it in MSIE since the last round of font-size etc fixes (they were looking vastly different in different browsers) so I'll check that as soon as I can - just trying to get the CSS to display nearly the same on all browsers at the moment.

Site is almost up to full "basic functionality" now, which means it's pretty close to being launchable (still not got the games added yet!). I've added a comments/suggestions module so that you can make public comments on any page - e.g. point out bugs, add new ideas, etc. This is NOT the planned mini-forums for each game - maybe it will be replaced by that when the mini-forums are ready.

All the suggestions are gathered in a central index, like in a bug-tracking system, which most of the editors can browse to see what people are saying (without having to go to each and every page).

I've also started testing with Google Ads. I suspect they'll kick the site off for having too little traffic, but until then it's useful as a test.

Now that the JGFv3 news seems to be working fine, I'll post all updates directly there, rather than in this thread, unless there's something truly major.

I copy the entire old site to the new server, and run BOTH sites at once off the same server. All the URLS are distinct and don't clash, so this is possible. There will probably be some tweaking needed - for instance fixing stylesheets which probably have the same names - which could take a couple of days.

The front page (javagamesfactory.com/) will be changed into a page which presents both sites and asks the user to choose one or the other. This will ONLY happen to javagamesfactory.com, because of some weirdness about how the domains were registered (don't ask ).

B - compelte transfer from one site to the other, probably mid-December

In this one, we get ALL the content up and running OK in the new site and server (which is currently the "alpha/preview").

As soon as that's transferred, we switch off the old server, transfer the domain name over, and WHAM! people surfing the web see a completely new site.

...

Option B is considerably less hassle for me. If some people volunteer to help get content transferred and tested then we could probably get it ready much sooner. The critical path is to get the articles and games pages implemented and tested - both are partialyy implemented and tested at the moment. Once I've completed those, then anyone can start transferring games and articles across.

thanks. Whilst I'm glad I put all the error logging in place early, that particular method call is doing a lazy calculation, hence the short stacktrace - and no indication of which class actually caused the error by putting unexpected data into the constructor of the InsufficientAuthorizationException via a Collection, and without generics it's not easy/fast for me to argument-check every instantiation .

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